Many fans consider this one of the worst, if not the worst, of the Doom console ports. It runs in a small screen at a low frame rate. The game offers six screen sizes, the largest two only being available via a cheat. The largest screen sizes suffer from a frame rate so poor as to render the player sometimes uncontrollable.

Its soundtrack, considered the port's one redeeming feature, consists of arrangements of the original music performed by a live band, recorded in high-fidelity CD-quality audio.

Its source code was released in 2014.

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According to Rebecca Ann Heineman, the game's sole developer, the blame for the port's quality rests mostly on the highly constrained schedule of ten weeks given for its development.[1] This led to a lack of time to fully optimize the game for the 3DO hardware, which was challenging to program both from an essential standpoint and in particular for a demanding application like Doom.

Publisher Art Data Interactive was under false impressions with regard to the ease of porting a game like Doom from the Atari Jaguar to another console, believing that simply recompiling the game would be sufficient, and that features such as new weapons could be added simply by providing new assets for the game engine to consume.

While game code is largely shared with the Jaguar version, the rendering engine is completely customized to draw walls through the 3DO's hardware "cell engine." Floors and ceilings are drawn in software, however, due to difficulties in drawing perspective-projected graphics through the cell engine. Heineman states work on piping that drawing through the hardware was in-progress but had to be abandoned due to unresolved bugs at launch time.

The decision to replace the MIDI-based PC soundtrack with live recorded music was made by Heineman on a whim due to lack of time to write a music driver for the 3DO. A band hired by ADI was used to do the recordings. With digitized music, it was possible to use simple streaming playback with minimal coding effort. Heineman states this was the best decision made in the process, as the music is the one aspect of the port almost universally praised.

Art Data Interactive also created some still images hoping to convince investors to provide funds to create FMV sequences for the port. One scene shows a cyberdemon, played by an actor wearing a costume with a dog-like nose and large bulbous eyes, feasting on the entrails of another actor wearing fatigue pants and a white shirt, with the greenscreened background replaced by the texture BROWN96. Another picture of the cyberdemon costume's head was used to create both a cover art mockup and a still image in front of an assortment of textures.[2]

The game was at one time scheduled to be published by Electronic Arts, but the deal fell through when that publisher stopped all of its projects for the ailing console in 1995.

The reduced screen size was due to a compromise with id Software, who felt that the fullscreen gameplay was too slow and choppy to be acceptable. Heineman left in a cheat code to allow larger screen sizes, however, to "future-proof" the game for potential future revisions of the 3DO with faster hardware.[3]

Burger Becky released the source code for the 3DO port on November 30, 2014 under the MIT license, a less restrictive license than the GNU General Public License v2, although it is presently unclear what the stance of ZeniMax Media is with respect to use of the code under these terms. Assets for the port were also included, though not under license, with a stipulation added that their commercial use requires permission from ZeniMax. Many of the assets are in PC-readable form, including a pristine uncompressed set of the Atari Jaguar maps and the corresponding single-patch textures used by them. Some other resources are in the proprietary 3DO CEL format or the equally proprietary and poorly supported Apple PICT format, making their use difficult. The enigmatic extramap.wad is also included.